US Air Force Wants To Plasma Bomb The Sky To Improve Radio Communication (newscientist.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: [The U.S. Air Force has plans to improve radio communication over long distances by detonating plasma bombs in the upper atmosphere using a fleet of micro satellites. It's not the first time we've tried to improve radio communication by tinkering with the ionosphere. HAARP, the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program in Alaska, stimulates the ionosphere with radiation from ground-based antennas to produce radio-reflecting plasma.] Now the USAF wants to do this more efficiently, with tiny satellites -- such as CubeSats -- carrying large volumes of ionized gas directly into the ionosphere. As well as increasing the range of radio signals, the USAF says it wants to smooth out the effects of solar winds, which can knock out GPS, and also investigate the possibility of blocking communication from enemy satellites. [There are at least two major challenges. One is building a plasma generator small enough to fit on a CubeSat -- roughly 10 centimeters cubed. Then there's the problem of controlling exactly how the plasma will disperse once it is released. The USAF has awarded three contracts to teams who are sketching out ways to tackle the approach. The best proposal will be selected for a second phase in which plasma generators will be tested in vacuum chambers and exploratory space flights.]

Comments

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the real reason here? It is not as if we have a problem with communication these days. I post this in Europe, people all over the world can read it after a fraction of a second. Bandwith and latency are solved problems too - go download something or play online games.

Cables and satellites work fine. Why make short-lived modifications to the ionosphere, that need to be constantly replenished? If they can afford a set of satellites, why not simply use those as communication relays? The lag is not so bad when they are in low orbits.

Re:Why?

[Lord Bitman]

There aren't enough cables. The Internet is such absurdly critical infrastructure, and we have only a handful of cables even for the most-dense connections. While the Internet routes around damage efficiently, the amount of time it takes to route around damage is longer than would be desired these days (where an assumption of failure is the norm for critical applications), and a small reduction in capacity could easily be catastrophic.

Re:Using Satellites to Do What Satellites Already

[messymerry]

Maybe they know something we don't. This setup will allow for an alternate comm path should the current satellites and cables become unavailable. Hams and the government would still be able to communicate. Assuming an EMP event, then most of the hams would be out of business and only the govt would still be able to communicate with the equipment that we paid for them to harden... Just sayin'

Brought back from the dead

[coastwalker]

This is excellent news if true. Short wave broadcast radio has been in decline all my life and radio hams have increasingly turned to the more exciting fields of digital communications and microwave. If it livens up the bands again then I am all for it. I assume that the objective is to learn how to thicken it up enough to locally cut off communications from space thereby killing the enemies communications network. The only downside might be disruption of radio astronomy, but we should be doing that from the moon anyway.

Re:Brought back from the dead

[yabutydu]

OMG! This is one of the worst ideas I have seen in a long time. Shortwave radio broadcast has been in decline simply because with the advent of practically universal worldwide handheld communication devices amateur radio has had difficulty capturing the minds of individual people. The Internet has given access to communications in the form of text, speech, vision, etc around the world and in modalities beyond measure. What the Air Force is talking about here is in reality polluting the ionosphere on a massive scale. It is the equivalent of contaminating or poisoning the ocean. Making the ionosphere opaque to electromagnetic radiation of any form would be fraught with difficulties beyond measure. Developing and using such an ability and using it as a weapon is (at least in my view) insane! "Keep your hands off my ionosphere!" would be my slogan!!!

Re:Using Satellites to Do What Satellites Already

[NotAPK]

The last time the USA fucked around with the ionosphere was a bit of a disaster. Please do not do this again; just leave it alone. Wired article. They are also an object group on stuffin.space.

Re:And I want to remove all cell towers in major c

[thesupraman]

I am sure that radio astronomers would agree with you on that one, as well as oppose this 'plan'

After all, while such plasma will help reflect internal signals, it will also help block external ones,
including signals to most other satellites - seems like a winner (although the effects are very
frequency dependent).

I suspect this is someone in charge of old systems wanting to get more funding for their little
fiefdom without looking at the modernisation of communications, where ionosphere bounce is
rapidly becoming an outdated method.

That and the fact that suggesting military NOT spend big money on any idea they come up with
if bordering on treason these days, right?

Mind you, the HAARP conspiracy crowd will LOVE it, make them even more paranoid ;)

Re:Using Satellites to Do What Satellites Already

[hey!]

One of my hobbies is critiquing unpublished authors, and there's a certain group of writers who write post-apocalyptic "gun sci-fi" where it's more important to get the minutiae of gun technology right than it is to get the science right. Their science tends to come straight from other stories. The EMP scenario is sufficiently popular that I decided to spend a weekend afternoon doing the research into EMP that they should have.

EMP is not magic, like in the movies or on TV. It works by physical effects that require energy to be propagated to the affected device, which can be shielded and otherwise radiation hardened. You would need a massive attack that saturates all of near space to take out all satellites from geosynchronous orbits down to LEO. Terrestrial effects are amplified by interaction with the Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field, but even so the kind of blanket destruction of electronics we see in TV sci-fi would require many, many warheads. Many small warheads work better than a few (or usually ONE in the stories I read).

So an attack on communication satellites would tend to be targeted at individual satellites or groups of satellites. Taking out all LEO satellites (assuming they can't be shielded) would require an attack similar to blanketing most of the surface of the Earth.